Making sustainability ‘real’: using group-enquiry to promote education
Ellis, G., & Weekes, T. (2008). Making sustainability ‘real’: using group-enquiry to promote education.
Environmental Education Research
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14
, 482-500. https://doi.org/10.1080/13504620802308287
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Making sustainability 'real': using group-enquiry to promote education for
sustainable development
Geraint Ellis
a
; Tony Weekes
a
a
School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Queen's University, Belfast, UK
Online Publication Date: 01 August 2008
To cite this Article Ellis, Geraint and Weekes, Tony(2008)'Making sustainability 'real': using group-enquiry to promote education for
sustainable development',Environmental Education Research,14:4,482 — 500
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Environmental Education Research
Vol. 14, No. 4, August 2008, 482–500
ISSN 1350-4622 print/ISSN 1469-5871 online
© 2008 Taylor & Francis
DOI: 10.1080/13504620802308287
http://www.informaworld.com
Making sustainability ‘real’: using group-enquiry to promote education
for sustainable development
Geraint Ellis* and Tony Weekes
School of Planning, Architecture and Civil Engineering, Queen’s University, Belfast, UK
Taylor and FrancisCEER_A_330995.sgm(Received 29 September 2007; final version received 27 June 2008)10.1080/13504620802308287Environmental Education Research1350-4622 (print)/1469-5871 (online)Original Article2008Taylor & Francis0000000002008Dr. GeraintEllisg.ellis@qub.ac.uk
Sustainable development is now widely held as a transcendental ideal of town and
country planning, yet the way in which it is taught in planning schools remains
problematic. This arises from a range of factors, including the all-persuasive nature of
sustainability and the lack of solid examples of success through implementation. The
issue of how best to promote learning for sustainable development in planning has
arguably intensified in the last two years in the case of the Royal Town Planning
Institute-sponsored ‘fast track’ one-year Masters, which has reduced the opportunities
for students to engage in wider (and perhaps even deeper) concepts, including that of
sustainable development. This paper explores this through discussion of a specific
project developed at Queen’s University Belfast, facilitated by a grant from the UK
Higher Education Academy. Working with a local community, this entailed a group of
students working on their Masters thesis collectively addressing issues of sustainable
regeneration in a small Irish market town. The design of the project draws heavily on the
concepts of enquiry based learning, experiential learning and action competence, which
are seen as being central to improving education for sustainable development (ESD). The
paper explores the benefits of such an approach and discusses the ways in which this
experience can help enhance student’s experience of ESD.
Keywords: education for sustainable development; action competence; planning;
sustainable regeneration
Introduction
Education for Sustainable Development (ESD) is a critical element in moving society
towards a more sustainable future and highlighted as such in Chapter 36 of Agenda 21,
agreed at the Rio Summit. There is a far-reaching debate on how ESD is best conceptualised
and implemented in higher education and outstanding questions over the nature of its
relationship to the goal of sustainable development itself (e.g. Bonnett 1999; Corcoran and
Wals 2004). A key division in this debate is whether ESD requires a paradigm shift in
society’s approach to learning (e.g. Sterling 2001; Jucker 2002) or whether it can be less
problematically integrated into existing models of education. Indeed, like the concept of
sustainable development itself, ESD is strongly contested and while it is important to
acknowledge the validity and necessity of such epistemological debate, this paper focuses
on how higher education tutors can further promote learning for sustainability in the short
term, within the confines of existing curricula and using modes of education that are
compatible with current university contexts. For this purpose, the definition of ESD
proposed by the UK government will be accepted,
1
with a specific emphasis on the imme-
diate need to develop ‘sustainability literacy’
2
(Parkin et al. 2004) as a means of adding
*Corresponding author. Email: g.ellis@qub.ac.uk
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Environmental Education Research 483
value to current higher education. Although this concept is not without detractors (e.g.
Butcher 2007), the Government has recognised that it should become a ‘core competency’
for professional graduates (HM Government 2005). Indeed, Parkin et al. (2004) suggest that
everyone will require some degree of proficiency in sustainability literacy but that it needs
to be tailored to specific disciplines. It is suggested that educational programmes for those
graduates likely to assume positions as influential gatekeepers for the wider transition to
sustainable development, such as teachers, engineers and those involved in various aspects
of resource management (hydrology, forestry or land use) require a particular emphasis on
sustainability literacy (e.g. Murray and Cotgrave 2007). Professional education in these
fields does, however, face a number of competing priorities that include balancing academic
achievement with more direct vocational ‘training’; satisfying the needs of accrediting
bodies with the wider expectation of education institutions and balancing a breadth of
curricula content with opportunities for deeper learning and skills development. Although
there is a broad recognition by professional institutes and the higher education sector of the
importance of ESD (e.g. Department for Education and Skills 2003; Institute of Civil
Engineering 2003; Wright 2004), it is suggested here that while concepts of sustainability
are increasingly reflected in curricula content, the need to address such competing priorities
has meant that many students on vocational courses are graduating with a relatively shallow
and unengaged understanding of sustainability. This will have implications for both the
quality and competence of the graduates concerned, as well as acting as a constraint in wider
efforts to promote sustainability.
This paper explores this issue in the context of a Masters course in the field of Town and
Country Planning
3
(hereon referred to as ‘planning’). As a professional discipline, planning
aims to regulate and spatially coordinate development activity in the public interest and
has, for the last decade at least, rhetorically adopted sustainable development as its primary
raison d’etre (Gunder 2006; Berke 2002). The paper will briefly discuss the role of planning
in the wider sustainable development agenda and the place of ESD within the planning
curriculum and highlight a number of constraints on engaging students on Masters planning
courses in deeper and more holistic learning for sustainability. It will discuss and evaluate
a particular approach developed on a Masters course in planning at Queen’s University,
Belfast (QUB) that has aimed at addressing some identified shortcomings and concludes by
making some general observations on enhancing Students’ experience of ESD.
Sustainable development and the planning curriculum
The built environment offers one of the key arenas for addressing the challenges of sustainable
development. It is the major site of energy production and consumption, waste management
and polarized social and environmental injustices. The management of the built environment
involves a wide range of policy areas, amongst which is planning. Consequently, professional
planners have an essential and valuable part to play in progressing the sustainability agenda.
Sustainability was quickly assimilated into planning practice following the 1992 Rio Summit
and was further strengthened by the requirements of the governing professional body in the
UK, the Royal Town Planning Institute (RTPI) (RTPI 2001; Batey 2003). This embracing
of sustainability as a central tenet of planning has also helped the profession re-establish its
legitimacy following a two decades of challenge from neo-liberalism during the Thatcher
years (Thornley 1991), so that now the rhetoric of sustainable development is central to state
discourse on planning, regeneration, place-making and housing delivery, now referred to as
the so-called ‘Sustainable Communities Agenda’ (Office of the Deputy Prime Minister 2005;
Raco 2007).
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484 G. Ellis and T. Weekes
However, critical review suggests that sustainable development fails to be reflected
adequately in day-to-day planning decisions and has only negligibly impacted on the domi-
nance of the ‘predict and provide’ approach to development (Owens and Cowell 2002;
Haughton and Counsell 2004). Indeed, the opening position in this paper is that just as there
is a tension between aspiration and reality in planning practice, so there is in planning
education, with a contrast between, for example, the RTPI’s expectations for accredited
courses (RTPI 2004) and in the benchmark statements for Town and Country Planning
(Quality Assurance Agency for Higher Education 2002) on the one hand and the actual
delivered experience of planning education on the other.
There is a need for some contextual explanation here. There are a number of routes in
the UK to gaining professional (RTPI) accreditation in planning,
4
but the one that is increas-
ingly becoming dominant is the intensive, one-year Masters course. These courses have
been introduced at more than 20 UK universities, following the RTPI’s revised vision for
professional education (RTPI 2001), replacing previous two-year courses. While a formal
evaluation of these courses is still being undertaken by the RTPI, it would appear that these
changes have had a relatively positive impact in terms of uplifting the quality and quantity
of students being attracted into the discipline and has stimulated planning schools to refocus
and update their curricula to match the revised learning outcomes proposed by the RTPI
(Thomas 2005a). This has also increased the competition between planning schools to
attract the best students, while fee increases and the intensification of the learning experi-
ence have raised student expectations and challenged academic staff to deliver their
programmes through more innovative means.
However, this shift from a two-year to a one-year programme has raised some concerns
over the inevitable reductions in the scope of the curriculum (Thomas 2005a), even if they
are delivered in a more organised and innovative form. The new more intensive
programmes have typically led to larger class sizes and left less time for academic reflection
and scholarly development on behalf of the students. It has also meant that planning schools
have inevitably had to drop or reduce some planning topics that would have been included
in previous two-year programmes.
5
In the face of increasing financial hardship, the need to
take up paid work and other extra-mural activities, it also appears that students are taking
an increasingly instrumental view that places more emphasis on securing a qualification
rather than gaining a wider planning ‘education’. The suggestion is therefore that, unless
carefully handled, the shift from a one- to a two-year course may have further discouraged
students from engaging in deeper forms of learning. This is where particular concerns over
planning education begin to intersect specifically with ESD.
It is suggested here that the relative short training on a planning course is insufficient to
hone the skills of ethical judgement and challenge dominant ideologies of modernisation
and globalisation (Davoudi 2000) that is required to sufficiently promote sustainable devel-
opment in the professional culture of planning. Furthermore, there appears to be an undue
emphasis on the environmental dimension to the detriment of the equally important social
and economic aspects of sustainability. There are, therefore, questions over whether gradu-
ating planners are sufficiently ‘sustainability literate’.
There is very little published pedagogy on sustainability in the planning curricula.
Some useful comment has been made in regard to the education for the built environ-
ment, largely focussed on architecture (Edwards 2004; Lewis, Sayce, and Ellison 2005).
Indeed, the review by Lewis, Sayce and Ellison (2005) suggests that ESD remains
‘marginal in the curriculum’ (p. 7) of built environment education, in terms of both
content and ethos. Where ESD is included in built environment programmes, it is due to
the enthusiasm of individual academic staff, rather than a structured approach to the need
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